Used And Abused Steroids

Persuasive essay

Steroids: To Use or Not to Use?

Many of the most respected athletes such as Marc McGuire, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Jose Canseco have all used steroids. This drug can cause many serious physical and psychological side effects that many people are not aware of. In spite of these hazards, steroid use is still currently escalating in America's favorite past time: baseball. Professional athletes insist on taking them because they feel as though it increases their competitive advantage and athletic performance. The use of anabolic steroids causes serious health problems, it's a form of cheating, and its use should be abolished.

Steroids are man made drugs used to treat conditions that occur when the body makes abnormally low amounts of testosterone. However, other more serious side-effects aren't as well known.

"Some side-effects include liver cancer, jaundice, high blood pressure, and increase cholesterol. In addition, other risks men take when using steroids include shrinking of the testicles, reduced sperm count, infertility, baldness, development of breasts and increased risk for prostate cancer. Not only do steroids cause physical effects, they also cause psychiatric affects. Some of these include irritability, aggressiveness, depression, mood swings, altered libido, psychosis and mental addiction." (Pope)

I personally have never even thought about taking steroids because of all of the known effects. I would never want to be the person to find out the unknown. In taking steroids, not only will my body go through all kinds of weird changes, my mind will as well. In taking them, people are doing much more harm to their bodies than they know about. They are endangering their physical well being in addition to their emotional well being.

If in a relationship, steroids can make you aggressive towards your partner when you normally wouldnt. Even a non-aggressive person can become very hostile or start causing fights for no reason because they don't know how to deal with the new emotions they're going through. Also, the use of steroids can cause depression. More often than not, people take steroids in an attempt to help feel better about themselves when in fact they are taking a giant risk of feeling even worse. Besides, altering your libido definitely will not help a man feel better about himself. Have you ever seen that episode of South Park when Jimmy takes steroids to help him win the Special Olympics and ends up beating up his girlfriend? Yeah, that can actually happen.

I believe that steroids are used because the young kids who use them are not aware of what they truly are. When they first take steroids they don't think of the bad things that will happen, only the good. The individual may think that they'll look great in a bathing suit because his muscles will be huge or that he'll grow a few more inches and gain those few extra pounds making him look and feel less scrawny. Yet, that is obviously not always the case.

In this book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big, Jose Canseco gives the reasons that he used steroids. He writes,

"Steroids, used correctly, will not only make you stronger and sexier, they will also make you healthier... It wasn't until I was drafted in the 15th round by the Athletics that I decided to tune into steroids. One definite side effect of steroid use is the atrophying of your testicles, but here's the point I want to emphasize: what happens to your testes has nothing to do with any shrinking of the penis. That's a misconception. As a matter of fact, the reverse can be true. Using growth hormone can make your penis bigger, and make you more easily aroused. So to the guys out there who are worried about their manhood, all I can say is: Growth hormone worked for me."(Canseco 88)

Canseco is the perfect example of why not to use steroids. He may be compared to Willie Stargell, Duke Snider, Willie McCovey and Reggie Jackson (all of which are Hall of Fame baseball players who were never convicted of steroid use) but his personal life is an emotional wreck. In the peak of his career, and peak of his steroid use, Canseco was arrested for aggravated assault against his wife after driving his car into her brand new one. A few years later, married to another woman, he physically assaulted her. He was sentenced to probation and was told to attain anger management counseling for a year. Perhaps the steroids caused his aggression? It's hard to say. Although Canseco has been compared to Hall of Famers, he himself is not a member. Maybe his time hasn't come, or maybe the steroids have kept him from achieving such a goal.

Steroid use is a form of cheating. Instead of hard work and training to gain the athleticism true athletes achieve, many baseball players are taking the easy way out. A few injections of steroids with a few days in the gym will give the athlete the same results as months of training and protein shakes for another athlete. Put simply, it's just not fair.

Steroid use doesn't truly help the player as much as they think. The strength the user gains is really only needed in batting. Increased muscles in the arms will only help the batter hit the ball out of the stadium, but what about their fielding? They get so "beefy" that it affects their game. How many jacked guys have you seen walking down the street that can't even lift their arms above their heads or have a hard time walking? Sure, it may help score a few extra runs, but it won't help them catch that fly ball. Also, speed is an important factor to help make plays in baseball. If you're too big, you can barely walk to home-plate to bat, let alone run to first base. Say you're a shortstop and the ball goes in between you and second base. If you're too big to run to catch the ball, you screw up an easy